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A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja

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As a journalist who has covered Iran and Iraq--and US policy towards both--for 17 years, I have always found that the story of Halabja, and the use of poison gas by the Iraqis during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, was lost in the shadows of claim and counter-claim.

Joost Hiltermann's "A Poisonous Affair" sheds light on this critical period in a way that no other book or report ever has. Based on years of painstaking research--including access to the 18 tons of documents spirited from northern Iraq to the United States in 1991--this book is the most cogent, detailed and rigorous analysis likely to be produced about those events, and the first use of Weapons of Mass Destruction since World War II.

Made clear in this important text is Iraq's singular usage of chemical weapons and work on an array of nerve agents; the impact of poison gas on the psyche of Iraq's Kurds--and how they use that horrific experience of Halabja as a tool to claim special status today--and of the deliberate doubt sown by US officials at the time to portray Iran as equally to blame. Hiltermann deconstructs the quiet US effort that sought to indicate that Iran, too--with all evidence to the contrary--had used chemical weapons in Halabja and elsewhere along the front line.

Today, the author argues, that example of the US supporting Saddam Hussein during the war, even as it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons, and Washington's reluctance to challenge Iraq while it fought its "greater" enemy the Islamic Republic, is one reason Iran distrusts US and Western promises regarding its nuclear program.

Piecing together these historical events, which continue to resonate today with cautionary lessons learned, Hiltermann has produced an indispensable book for any reader who wants to better understand current, sometimes precipitous, policies of the US, Iraqi Kurds, and Iran.

Please to disregard N. Massjouni's agit-prop. While the US did not go far enough in condemning Iraq it lacked the power to constrain Saddam even if it had wanted to do so. In the eighties the US had far less leverage with the regime than did the Europeans and Soviets. US weapons sales to the Iraqi military were tiny compared to European and Warsaw Pact sales. The idea that the US was some kind of ally of Iraq at the time is absurd, for that you'll have to look to France and the USSR. Yes, the US provided anthrax spores to Iraq, unwisely as it turned out. But this was within the framework of medical research, the transfers being between university researchers, no different from dozens of other such international transfers. Unwise in that peculiarly naive Western way, yes, but not evidence of support for Iraqi WMD programs. US military and diplomatic support of Iraq was intended to prevent an Iranian victory, just as US and Israeli support for Iran after the invasion was intended to prevent an Iraqi one. Soulless balance-of-power realism no doubt, but the US had very little influence on either regime. People forget that for years after Halabja much progressive opinion sneered at reports of it as US propaganda.

It should be made clear that the US was not only complicit in the crimes committed against the Kurds and Iranians by Iraq. They actively provided Iraq with the biological germs required to produce these weapons.